ESTIMATING NEAR-SURFACE SOIL-MOISTURE AVAILABILITY USING A METEOROLOGICALLY DRIVEN SOIL-WATER PROFILE MODEL

This paper presents a simple water budget model for determining the vertical profile of soil water content. The model is driven by conventional meteorological and land use data. The modeled solutions of soil water content become independent of their starting conditions after a few weeks to a few months into a simulation depending on rainfall and evapotranspiration. Once the model becomes free of its initial conditions (a state to which we refer as 'balanced'), the model is driven almost completely by current environmental conditions. Two sets of data were used to validate the model which showed close agreement between simulations and measurements. This paper presents the details of the water budget model and verifications from two field experiments.